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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
The first aim of this anthology is to illustrate the variety of resources that Austronesian and Papuan languages offer their speakers for referring to space. The languages here described are spread from Madagascar to Tonga, and there are many differences between them. They also offer a striking contrast to Indo-European languages, and call into question universalistic claims about human spatial concepts and spatial reference based solely on evidence from Indo-European languages and their speakers. There are, however, striking parallels between the kinds of systems that languages offer and that their speakers employ when referring to space. Understanding the differences in the ways that coordinate systems are used requires not only linguistic, but also cultural, historical, and geographical knowledge. Thus the second aim of the collection is to illustrate the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of space if we are to understand the underlying logic of conceptions of space manifest in verbal expressions. The first three papers offer overviews of the conception of space in Austronesian languages and analyse the coordinate systems employed for spatial reference. The seven papers which follow offer anthropological linguistic descriptions of directionals and locatives in Austronesian and Papuan languages, and the last three contributions offer a more structurally-oriented perspective.
International scholars and researchers present cutting edge contributions on the significance of vocabulary in current thinking on first and second language acquisition in the school and at home. By pursuing common themes across first and second language and bilingual contexts, the editors offer a collection that tackles the most important issues.
The topic addressed in this volume lies within the study of sentence processing, which is one of the major divisions of psycholinguistics. The goal has been to understand the structure and functioning of the mental mechanisms involved in sentence comprehension. Most of the experimental and theoretical work during the last twenty or thirty years has focused on 'first-pass parsing', the process of assigning structure to a sentence as its words are encountered, one at a time, 'from left to right' . One important guiding idea has been to delineate the processing mechanisms by studying where they fai . For this purpose we identify types of sentences which perceivers have trouble assigning structure to. An important class of perceptually difficult senten ces are those which contain temporary ambiguities. Since the parsing mechanism cannot tell what the intended structure is, it may make an incorrect guess. Then later on in the sentence, the structure assignment process breaks down, because the later words do not fit with the incorrect structural analysis. This is called a 'garden path' situation. When it occurs, the parsing mechanism must somehow correct itself, and find a different analysis which is compatible with the incoming words. This reanalysis process is the subject of the research reported here.
A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity. Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time:" I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.
Throughout modern history, the Garden of Eden narrative has been viewed through the blurred lenses of tradition and science by both sides of the apologetic debate. In this comprehensive study, Collins challenges readers to look at human origins with a fresh understanding, unhindered by modern culture and varying traditions, and guides them to examine prerequisite elements necessary for a more incisive understanding of the story of Eden, including covenants, original language, and ancient history. The result is a unique and insightful account of the first love story, with its secrets laid bare for the first time in ages. Drawing from extensive and expansive resources, Collins dissects the story of Eden to reveal a shocking truth that unlocks the mystery of the Fall of Mankind. Peer back through oceans of time to discover and investigate the thread that unites man with God and reveals the awesome beauty and ultimate power of forgiveness.
Shortlisted for the 2020 ESSE Book Award in English Language and Linguistics Orality in Written Texts provides a methodologically and theoretically innovative study of change in Irish English in the period 1700-1900. Focusing in on a time during which Ireland became overwhelmingly English-speaking, the book traces the use of various linguistic features of Irish English in different historical contexts and over time. This book: draws on data from the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), which is composed of personal letters to and from Irish emigrants from the start of the eighteenth century up until the end of the twentieth century; analyses linguistic features that have hitherto remained neglected in the literature on Irish English, including discourse-pragmatic markers, and deictic and pronominal forms; discusses how the survival of the pragmatic mode has resulted in the preservation of certain facets of the Irish English variety as known today; explores sociolinguistic issues from a historical perspective. With direct relevance to corpus-based literary studies as well as the exploration of hybrid, modern-day text forms, Orality in Written Texts is key reading for advanced students and researchers of corpus linguistics, varieties of English, language change and historical linguistics, as well as anyone interested in learning more about Irish history and migration.
The chapters in this volume are the result of a series of Cognitive Sciences Workshops held at McGill University. Each workshop was organized around a different theme and each of these topics is represented in the volume: language acquisition and development; text and text processing; computer chess; grammars, parsers, and language comprehension; scientific reasoning and problem solving; language and the brain; and semantics. The topics are approached from the perspectives of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and neurology.
This book focuses attention on a relatively neglected component of communication-silence-in order to present current research from a number of disciplines and also to stimulate further research on the subject. Silence is often viewed as an out-of-awareness phenomenon against which talk is perceived. By reversing polarities and treating silence as a figure to be examined against talk, we are given a heightened awareness of the universal aspects of human behavior while emphasizing its complex nature as a cultural phenomenon.
Building on Raymond Williams' iconic "Keywords" released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the 'New Labour' project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the 'Blair Years', and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat. Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.
This work is a psycho linguistic investigation of the processing of tense (more specifically, the English past tense): When it is interpreted, how it is interpreted, and what it is interpreted with respect to. While there has been a great deal of attention paid to tense in the syntax and semantics literature, little work has been done on the details of the psychological processing of this category. The chief value and contribution of this book is to present a richly detailed in-depth study of the processing of tense in adult comprehension tasks, providing an excellent model of how to conceive of detailed experimental work against a background of sophisticated, deep, and broad linguistic theory. The discussion of the representational issues is deep and informative, and is directly brought to bear on experimental issues. The experiments aim to evaluate whether a hypothesis called "Parsimony," a highly plausible notion that has received tentative experimental support in other domains, is the chief controlling feature of the interpretation of tense. The experimental results presented quite consistently do not confirm the apparent predictions made by Parsimony, but rather tend to be more consistent with another view (which Parsimony is aimed at opposing) which holds that actual structural factors in the syntax of a sentence are a decisive factor. Along the way, the author considers a number of other plausible hypotheses as the experimental results are presented, but evaluating Parsimony remains the chief organizing principle of the line of research presented here.
Is Kangaroo an Aboriginal word? What does brolga mean? Many of the words Australians use every day have their origins in some of the hundreds of Aboriginal languages once spoken across the land. this book is a fascinating reference for anyone interested in knowing more about the original inhabitants of this vast continent.
A multimodal ethnography of language as living process, this book demonstrates methods for the integrated analysis of talk, gesture, and material culture, developing a fresh way to understand human language through a focus on jointly achieved social actions to which it is part. Based on findings from a participatory, multimedia language documentation project in a highland Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, Mark A. Sicoli brings together goals of documentary linguistics and anthropological concern with the everyday means and ends of human social life with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic and cultural reproduction and change. This book argues that resonances emergent in the whole of multiparticipant, multimodal interaction, are organizational of human social-cognitive process important for understanding both the shape linguistic utterances take in interaction (dialogic resonance) and the relationships built between distinct sign modes (intermodal resonance). In this way, Saying and Doing in Zapotec develops a new theory, characterizing the logic of resonance in human interaction as semiotic process that connects and juxtaposes interactional moves into assemblages of relations, resonances and collaborations that build an emergent lifeworld for a language.
Growing out of an International Society of the Study of Behavioral Development-sponsored symposium, this book discusses the basic assumptions that led the contributors to conduct research in the field of narrative development. This collection gathers their research reflections and varying approaches to narrative and its development. It illustrates each type of approach and highlights their respective motives. The book presents some of the basic motivating assumptions of each approach and provides insight into what holds each set of assumptions together, potentially transforming them into actions. This book will serve as an excellent text for courses emphasizing multiple approaches to the study of narrative. The editor has organized this volume in accordance with the six main points of the symposium: * Specification of the Domain--how narratives are defined in terms of textual structures, knowledge thereof, interactive moves, sociocultural conventions, and the like. * The Individual's Involvement in the Developmental Process--the relationship between some internal or external forces and the organism's own active participation in the developmental process. * The Course of Development--if it is continuous or discontinuous; whether it proceeds in an additive fashion or whether regressive phases occur; and what changes at different points in the developmental process signify. * The Goal of Development--the implicit notion of a telos, a target or end-point that needs to occur in the developmental process. * Mechanisms of Development--the forces and/or conditions that both instigate the developmental process and keep it moving toward its telos. * Methodology--where and how to look in the establishment of a developmental framework. This book is an indispensable text in the fields of narrative and/or discourse, linguistics, language studies, psychology, and education in general.
This book provides both young and senior scientists with a comparative view of current theoretical models of text production. Models are clearly situated in their historical context, scrutinized in their further evolution with a fine-grained observation of differences between models. Very complete and informative to read, this book will be useful to people working in teaching of writing or studying this specific human activity.
This volume provides an up-to-date and evaluative review of theoretical and empirical stances on emotion and its close interaction with language and cognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Importantly, it presents a novel methodological approach that takes into account contextual information and hence goes beyond the reductionist approach to affective language that has dominated contemporary research. Owing to this pragmatic approach, the book presents brand new findings in the field of bilingualism and affect and offers the first neurocognitive interpretation of findings reported in clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism. This not only represents an invaluable contribution to the literature, but may also constitute a breakthrough in the investigation of the worldwide phenomenon of bilingualism. Beginning with a thorough review of the history and current state of affective research and its relation to language, spanning philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and linguistic perspectives, the volume then proceeds to explore affect manifestation using neuropragmatic methods in monolingual and bilingual individuals. In doing so, it brings together findings from clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism with cognitive, psychophysiological and neuroimaging paradigms. By combining conceptual understanding and methodological expertise from many disciplines, this volume provides a comprehensive picture of the dynamic interactions between contextual and affective information in the language domain. Thus, Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers: A Neuropragmatic Perspective fosters a pragmatic approach to research on affective language processing in monolingual and bilingual population, one that builds bridges across disciplines and sparks important new questions in the cognitive neuroscience of bi- and multilingualism.
"Contrastive Linguistics" is the first book written by a linguist from mainland China on the histories and principles of comparing and contrasting Chinese and Western languages, specifically English. From Wilhelm von Humboldt's initial study in comparative linguistics to the present day, traditional scholarship in contrastive linguistics has taken a Western perspective and shown how foreign languages relate to the Indo-European language family. However, such a view has a limited scope, and there is an alternative history to contrastive linguistics. This book is an attempt by Professor Wenguo Pan to redress the balance in contrastive linguistics, comparing Western languages to Chinese, rather than vice versa. He provides a survey of contrastive linguistics in China throughout the past century, and aims to open a window for the world to see what the new generations of Chinese linguists are doing in this exciting field, and to start a dialogue between scholars of different backgrounds and linguistic traditions. "Contrastive Linguistics" looks at the history of this discipline both in Europe and in China. Professor Pan presents a survey of the historical, philosophical and methodological foundations of the discipline, but also examines its scope in relation to general, comparative, anthropological and applied linguistics. This book will be of interest to academics interested in a new perspective on contrastive linguistics or Chinese linguistics.
How do people understand metaphorical language? How do metaphors affect the way people experience their social interactions? Do people always interpret metaphors? Does a metaphor necessarily have the same meaning to different people? Can a commonplace metaphor affect the way people think even if they don't interpret it? Why does it matter how people interpret metaphors? In this book, Ritchie proposes an original communication-based theory of metaphor that answers these and other questions about metaphors and metaphorical language.
In recent scholarship, the connection between Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic is studied in a more systematic way. The idea of studying these two varieties in one theoretical frame is quite new, and was initiated at the conferences of the International Association for the Study of Middle and Mixed Arabic (AIMA). At these conferences, the members of AIMA discuss the latest insights into the definition, terminology, and research methods of Middle and Mixed Arabic. Results of various discussions in this field are to be found in the present book, which contains articles describing and analysing the linguistic features of Muslim, Jewish and Christian Arabic texts (folklore, religious and linguistic literature) as well as the matters of mixed language and diglossia. Contributors include: Berend Jan Dikken, Lutz Edzard, Jacques Grand Henry, Bruno Halflants, Benjamin Hary, Rachel Hasson Kenat, Johannes den Heijer, Amr Helmy Ibrahim, Paolo La Spisa, J r me Lentin, Gunvor Mejdell, Arie Schippers, Yosef Tobi, Kees de Vreugd, Manfred Woidich, and Otto Zwartjes.
Most analyses of interpersonal communication ignore the relationship between communication and culture. When intercultural communication takes place, the interlocutors may have very different conceptions of what is being discussed, since meaning in any culture results from lifelong learning within that culture. Such concepts as worldviews, cultural beliefs, and decision-making processes are unique to each culture, and affect each culture's interpretation of meaning. To illustrate problems with communication and culture, Dahl focuses on the cultures of Madagascar and the Western World. He suggests many ways in which the Malagasy's worldview and values are different from the Westerner's, and how these differences affect communication. A "meaning matrix" is included to assist in interpretations of everyday cases.
Spanish and Portuguese Across Time highlights the range possible for scholars trained in a department of linguistics and literature, and shows that these disciplines need not be mutually exclusive. It covers a diverse range of topics, which nevertheless retain a common focus, on the dynamic nature of languages and the social forces that shape them across time, place, and borders. Themes in Part I - Linguistics and Literature: Translation, Society, and Language Variation - include the literary representation of speech, social, and regional variation, and some history on linguistic devices used in the service of social criticism. The work here demonstrates how linguistic principles can offer productive angles to the study of literature, and that literary sources can serve as data for linguistic analysis. The papers in Part II - Language Change, Language Contact, and Language Users - continue the focus on the interface between language and social factors, with both historical and present-day data on speech and speakers' behavior.
Language use is a principal means by which we distinguish ourselves and our group from others. In the modern age, language use often divides ethnic groups and nations: Germans are Germans because they speak German; French citizens must accept that Standard French is a central part of their national identity. Sociologists of language consider this equation of personal language use and national identity to be a product of the nationalism which developed in Europe from the eighteenth century on. Authority and Identity: A Sociolinguistic History of Europe before the Modern Age is the first attempt to take the theoretical and methodological insights of macrosociolinguistics and apply them to the history of Europe before 1500. It analyses the recurrent tensions felt since writing technology first began to be used in Europe some 3,500 years ago between centrifugal and centripetal forces, demonstrating how similar linguistic ecologies can produce different kinds of linguistic authority and identity in individuals and groups due to differing sociolinguistic conditions. |
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